This Could be Ludlow or Anywhere

Wednesday, 9 April 2014

When I was larking about in Bristol the other week I
stumbled across a rather fabulous little shop. Run by Koreans, their produce
was natch mainly Korean, but they sensibly made a little nod to some other gear
from way out East. I bought some fermented chilli bean paste, which is not
remotely Korean but Chinese and specifically Sichuan.

Occasionally, when I’m not pretending to set up my own
business, playing Angry Birds on my phone, or checking out the crumpet at the
new opticians next door to Harp Lane, I’ll read a book. I’ve just finished
Shark’s Fin & Sichuan Pepper by Fuchsia Dunlop. A great read, but can you
get any specialist Sichuan ingredients round here? Quite. I got my wife Fifty
Shades of Grey recently, hopefully the feedback of that particular tome will be
unpublishable.

So I’ve gone to Bristol and got all the kit and I knock up
one of the best meals I’ve made in a very long time. I’m not one to extol my
own culinary virtues, but bloody hell – Fuchsia’s ‘Fish-fragrant aubergines’
turned out pretty tidily. Strange name for a dish that contains not a jot of
fish, but the depth and pure savouriness that came from this particular
concoction was extraordinary.

The cooking of the Sichuan Province leans on ‘umami’ (the
yummy taste you get from stuff like Parmesan cheese, Worcester sauce, and wild
mushrooms) and mad, intense heat. This is man-food in extremis but never
wishing to be too blokey I made it for my dear chum and business partner Lydia,
and she had seconds.

I’ll give you the recipe if you like, but you’d do well
buying Fuchsia’s book

Back from Chengdu, I touch down in little ol’ Ludlow. Turns
out my former employers, Ludlow Food Centre are taking on a shop in the centre
of Ludlow as a café-deli. Ice cream, fancy sarnies, bags of personality, that
sort of thing. It sounds super. Rumour has it they were after our site at Harp
Lane but I’m far too discreet and professional to comment on that particular
issue. No idea Your Honour. Ludlow’s a funny town in that many people have
tried coercing me into slamming LFC. I wish them well, truly I do. The more the
merrier. My only advice - for what it’s worth – make some mates round here.
Being aloof doesn’t get you very far round here.

Competition aside, I need to find me a supplier of Sichuan
stuff. Tasty times ahead. Watch this space.

I rarely travel by train any more. I have a car that works
perfectly well, and I can fill it with children and all their kit. My car runs
quite inexpensively and generally on time. Trains don’t. However, given the
rare opportunity when I get to go somewhere on my own without the kids and
associated paraphernalia, I’ll splash out, hope that I don’t have to spend
eight hellish hours waiting at Newport for a missed connection and thoroughly
enjoy the ride.

On a solitary train journey one is all but forced to sit
nice and still in one place, drink a tin or two of warm and overpriced train
Stella Artois (optional), and gaze at the countryside as it rattles by. This is
my idea of Nirvana (I get that it may not be yours), and last week I chugged
down to Bristol with only a ten-minute wait at Newport. Phew.

What a city: all Brunel and beards, a railway station that
looks like a cathedral, and some of the best places to eat anywhere I know. I
was taken out for lunch by my friend Xanthe who writes about food for the
Telegraph (a bit like this paper, but with bigger pages and less fat stock
news) to a place called Flinty Red where I ate amongst other things, hang on,
I’ve still got the menu, “Roast Carrot and Ewe’s Curd, Carpaccio of Kid Loin
with Caper & Lemon Dressing, Seared Onglet with Creamed Kale” and I came
very close to weeping with happiness in front of Xanthe. Which would have been
horribly embarrassing. Such simple stuff, so painfully bang-on 2014, but
effortless too. And cheapy cheap cheap. And the place wasn’t even full.
Astonishing. In Ludlow a gaff like Flinty Red would be booked up months in
advance.

I didn’t think it could get much better until five hours
later when it did, at Bell’s Diner. Much of the same but up a notch and I think
this time I actually did do a little cry, but it was darkish in Bell’s so I
reckon I got away with it. I’ve got their menu too, but it would be showing off
to relate that to you. Google it and go.

There are funky little coffee shops everywhere you turn,
great pubs on each corner, friendly people, mad hairy wholefood shops selling
bags of foraged foliage, bonkers wine shops. Enough already, you get the idea,
I enjoyed myself in Brizzle.

But back at home, I spotted some local asparagus in the
shops, a sure sign of tastiness lurking just round the corner. This weekend,
what could be more springy than the clocks changing and Mothering Sunday? A
cause for celebration if ever there was one.

I bet on horses twice a year: The Grand National, and
Cheltenham Gold Cup. Having blown a whole tenner on some daft nag at Cheltenham
(I think he’s probably still trying to find the finishing line), I shovelled
copious amounts of well rotted gee-gee dung on to my veg patch and thought to
myself, ‘this is all they’re useful for’.

By bespattering half of my garden with semi-digested straw I
welcome in spring and think about the treats that lie ahead. New potatoes will
probably go in first after they’ve enjoyed a good chit on a warm window-sill.
To remind myself just how lovely a home grown early spud is, I bought myself a
bag of Jersey Royals, which as they have done every year for the last decade or
so, bought nothing but disappointment in the eating.

I’m not one for gastronomic nostalgia – very few things
tasted better back in the good old days – but Jerseys sure as heck used to be
so much tastier. Mr Farmer the greengrocer tells me that they no longer use
seaweed (or vraic, as they call it over there) as a fertiliser, a fact
that used to contribute to their unique and delicious flavour. Whatever the
reasons, until my own taters are ready I’ll be unfashionably opting for the
imported Majorcan earlies, which taste like a new potato ought to. Stuff the
air miles, quite frankly.

I’ll also be getting my onion sets in soon, although I’m not
really sure why I bother growing a vegetable that can be bought so cheaply and
ubiquitously. You pop a baby onion in the ground, wait a few months, you pull
up a bigger one. Pretty boring horticulture really.

However, the onion is the one vegetable, and possibly any
ingredient, that gets more use in my kitchen than any other.

Pretty much every meal I prepare will involve this most
handy of all alliums, although more often than not it plays an essential, but
cameo role. Think of Ghostbusters without Dr Egon Spengler. See? It’s
unimaginable. Well, that’s the onion. Often appearing alongside carrots and
celery in a classic mirepoix or sofrito in braises, soups and stews, an onion
will provide savoury bottom notes when cooked soft and slow without being
allowed to take on colour and caramel flavours.

I should let onions play the protagonist more frequently.
Baked whole with cream and cheese, pureed to go with lamb, I love a deep French
onion soup, a sticky tangle on a pissaladiere (a southern French - and utterly
delicious – version of pizza). Yummy yum. Perhaps it is worth growing a few of
my own after all.

Here I go with another column in arrears. Deficit
journalism. It was Shrove Tuesday last week and I completely forgot about it. I
couldn’t give a flipping toss (see what I’ve done there?) about pancakes.
Anyway, forgot about it I did, until I got home last Tuesday evening to find my
little girls smearing pancakes loaded with chocolate spread all over their
pretty little faces.

This kind of defies the whole idea of Shrove Tuesday: use up
all the eggs, flour and milk in your house and subsist on dust and gravel until
Easter Sunday. You’ve been a bad person. Lent it out. But don’t go buying a jar
of Nutella. It will not admonish you from sin. I told that to my wife, who was
pretty ambivalent.

When I was small we went on family holidays to Brittany in
the north of France, every year for quite a long time. We’d take the ferry to
St Marlo from Portsmouth and Mum, Dad, my sister Tilly and me would all bundle
into a tiny cabin. Once across the Channel it would be a short time until we
met our first galette
complete.
Ham,
egg, cheese, and a lacey-thin pancake. That’s what it’s all about my friends.
No other pancake - in my opinion - is worth the strife.

If you don’t want to cross the Channel for some decent grub
do what I did last week and nip down to London. I went down for ‘research’ and
a ‘meeting’ to gather a few ideas in order to make Harp Lane (My deli? In
Ludlow? Opening soonish? Ring any bells? I may have mentioned it 8985095834
times before) the best it can possibly be.

Do what I did, handpick a few places in our capital, and
you’ll quickly realise that the Big Smoke has never screamed louder in terms of
gastronomy. Not clever stuff, not expensive flimflammery, just top-notch grub
in warehouses, whorehouses, and outhouses. Making do, but not in that tired and
overdone post-warish way, just very current, cool, and above all – bloody
tasty.

There
are boys with beards and tattoos cooking the sort of food that we can only
dream of up here, for half the price. Girls out front who do customer service
like we’ve never known, and they look like supermodels too. I understand that
it’s a trade-off. We have a life in Shropshire that those smokin’ hot hipsters
down there can only dream of. And a couple of days in London now is enough for
me. I’m always happy to be heading west on the Westway. Driving over
Titterstone Clee, down into Ludlow on the first sunny day in three months,
well, Shropshire has never looked better. Those supermodel waitresses don’t
know what they’re missing.

Saturday, 8 March 2014

Easy José the Coffee Guy came to visit me recently, because
he’s going to supply my little shop in Ludlow with beans and machines and all
the paraphernalia one needs to make a grown up cup of coffee. If you want to
get serious about coffee (which I do), you’ve got to know a guy like Easy José.
Have you ever met a Wine Guy? All “top notes of a wet pavement” this, and
“bosky little nuances of tobacco and bog-myrtle” that. Loud corduroys and
checked shirts? You must have met a Wine Guy.

Well, the coffee lot are less shouty and slurpy, and more
poetic and pretty. José the Coffee Guy ran us through some of the treats
that will be coming our way: Sumatran stuff that tasted like sweeties, Kenyan
coffee both grapefruity and chocolately at the same time, Ethiopian Yirgacheffe
that was a flower meadow in a cup. It was a crazy way to spend the day and by
the end of it my heart was palpitating and I didn’t sleep for forty eight
hours. But, it was tremendous fun, and we’ll do coffee at Harp Lane like nobody
else. We’re getting a little bar in where you can perch and knock back a
perfectly constructed flat white. You won’t want to hang around (though you’ll
be welcome to) because our coffee will be served at a neckable 65 degrees
Celsius, and that’s the temperature to have it. So there.

Here in Ludlow, being fifteen miles away from the Welsh
border I feel as if I should have done something about St David’s day last
week. Didn’t even cross my mind I’m afraid. Nothing personal, I just forgot. I
love Wales, I can just about see it from where I write. For a long time in I
went for Welsh girlfriends. I’ve matured since then, but a Welsh accent on a
lady can still turn me all wobbly at the knees. My first ever beau in fact was Wewish
. Cracking. If you’re able, get you one of them. Jude wasn’t particularly
Welsh, or Jewish, but a great combo nevertheless.

Hafod, Perl Las, Gorwydd Caerphilly. Three cheeses that
would always make it into my top ten all time. I holiday in Pembrokeshire every
summer and, I was schooled in Monmouth. Which is (I think) in Wales.

I can’t be sure (partly as this column still very
rarely makes it online – so it’s tricky to check dates) but I think this may be
my 51st column for this paper, making next week my 1st
anniversary. Not one week off, and 23,000 words. How about that?

Sunday, 2 March 2014

And then it stopped raining. The first time since before
Christmas. An orange orb hung in the air. At five o’ clock in the afternoon
there was light. The Storm abated for a few minutes last week so I popped up to
my veg patch, squelched it with the palm of my hand, hrrrumphed to myself and
went back inside for a cup of tea. Don’t know about the rest of you
veg-growers, but my patch is going to be unworkable until at least 2067.

Anyway, tea. I’m rubbish with tea, no taste at all. I do
coffee, cheese, wine, truffles, foie gras, caviar and all that sort of stuff
properly. But with tea I’m simple. In the afternoon I take a neat PG Tips with
a dash of milk. I can’t be doing with supermarket own-brand teabags, they just
don’t cut it. In the morning (and this is the important one) my preference is
50: 50 builders and Lapsang Souchong – two bags, one cup - with a Marlboro
Light. *For me this is the perfect weekday breakfast, but it’s so terribly
unfashionable to advocate a cigarette as part of a balanced breakfast that I
expect this will be subbed-out. *Subs:
Please don’t remove this bit!

I really struggle with breakfast. Just can’t be doing with
it, not on a normal working day. Toast and cereal just don’t flick my switch.
The very thought of porridge makes me want to go straight back to bed. Midweek
I’ll take a fag and a cup o’ tea. No better way to start your day, although I
obviously don’t tell my baby girls that. I fill them up with weetabix and bran
flakes and they’re happy.

Give me a Weekend Breakfast and I’m your man. Any time from
10.00am onwards. Full English, no beans, I’ll have that. If there’s fried
bread, then so much the better. Beans make a fry-up too saucy, and bean sauce
mingled with runny egg is intrinsically wrong.

Failing that I’ll have kedgeree please. With a glass of
beer. On a Sunday, Desert Island Discs or the Archers omnibus on the radio. The
bells of St Laurence’s Ludlow will be ringing.

Devilled kidneys and a cheeky bloody Mary, seed cake with a
glass of Madeira; kippers with buttered brown bread and strong, stewed tea;
eggs Benedict and the Sunday Times. A bit of leftover Chinese takeaway in the
fridge poses a treat of higher distinction than almost anything else. For me,
brunch is king, A meal to be revered. If like me, you’re a person of high and
distinguished taste, you’ll take your breakfast late in the morning. If,
however, you’re under eighteen then listen to your parents and ignore pretty
much everything I’ve just written.

The other day I was enjoying a pint of Hobsons best bitter
(one of my top five favourite all time beers) in the Sun Inn in Leintwardine
(one of my top five favourite local pubs) when I got a bit peckish. They don’t
do food at the Sun but there’s a fish ‘n’ chippy next door. So I popped in,
placed my order and twenty minutes later a smiley lady delivered it to my table
in the pub. Cracking arrangement. As I sat there ploughing through a delicious
pile of fried stuff – with a massive pickled gherkin and a tub of mushy peas on
the side – it occurred to me that so many of my very favourite things have
spent time in the deep-fat fryer.

Spanish churros, dusted with sugar and dunked in
bitter-sweet hot chocolate; doughnuts from the chap at the fair who looks like
he could do with a good shower; hot samosas; Italian fritto misto; Clive at
Ludlow’s Green Café used to do amazing deep fried pigs’ brains with sauce
gribiche. Love it all. Deep-fried stuff gets a bum wrap, but hang it: the taste
and texture implications far outweigh the scare mongering from the Association
of Squeaky Clean Arteries. Live dangerously I say. Although maybe not as
dangerously as I did once after a few ‘heavies’ one evening in Edinburgh after
wrapping up a week’s worth of board-treading at the Fringe (there’s so much
you don’t know about me).

Under the assumption that I’d purchased a humble
cheeseburger you can only imagine my horror and delight upon bighting into this
thing. The burger itself had been injected with lurid orange processed cheese
then dunked in batter and plunged in boiling oil. Reader, it was truly
magnificent. The following day however, I became more familiar than I would
have wished with pretty much every single service station between
Berwick-upon-Tweed and Stevenage.

Every year a gang of us go to the Ludlow
point-to-point races and every year, I’m the Scotch Egg Guy. It’s a faff of
greater worth than any other faff I know, because of all the stupendous stuff
to come out of the fryer, there is none better than my point-to-point Scotch
eggs. This is an actual fact. I don’t know who invented this much-molested
culinary marvel but I doubt it was a Scotsman (I refer you back to the
Edinburgh episode). This is the only time I ever deep fry as the smell of bad
pub kitchen tends to permeate the whole house for days. A properly made Scotch
egg, still hot, with a crisp exterior, moist sausage meat, and a runny yolk
would definitely make it onto my list of top five favourite things to eat ever
in the whole world.